Lawrence Garcia

By Lawrence Garcia Published in Cinema Scope 75 (Summer 2018) Ahead of Climax’s Quinzaine premiere, Gaspar Noé unveiled the movie’s hilariously boneheaded, almost exclusively text-based one-sheet: a rundown of his filmography, with each entry accompanied by a variation of presumed (not without reason) audience vitriol, capped off with an invitation (complete with a rendering [...]More →

By Lawrence Garcia Lukas Dhont is a name you will see again. With his debut feature Girl, which won nearly every award it could at Cannes (the Un Certain Regard FIPRESCI Prize, the Camera d’Or, the Queer Palm, plus a Best Actor prize for 16-year-old star Victor Polster), the Belgian director achieved something akin to [...]More →

By Lawrence Garcia In bald description, Mia Hansen-Løve’s follow-up to L’Avenir (2016) might seem a rather distasteful (or at least misguided) affair: Gabriel (Roman Kolinka), a French war correspondent recently released from Syrian captivity, returns to his childhood home in India, where he falls in love with the title character (Aarshi Banerjee), his godfather’s young [...]More →

By Lawrence Garcia Following the conflicted reportage of Victory Day and the fictional portmanteau of Donbass, Sergei Loznitsa delivers a third 2018 premiere with The Trial, an in-the-gallery documentary account of one of Stalin’s infamous Moscow Trials. Returning to primarily found-footage materials for the first time since The Event (2015), Loznitsa linearly condenses an 11-day [...]More →

By Lawrence Garcia On November 28, 1953, Frank Olson, a civilian American scientist and Central Intelligence Agency employee, fell or jumped through a window from the 13th floor of the Hotel Statler (now the Hotel Pennsylvania) in midtown Manhattan. Thus begins Errol Morris’ plunge into the sordid, sensational CIA “mind-control” program known as MK-Ultra, with [...]More →

By Lawrence Garcia That Guy Maddin’s feature-length follow-up to his most monumental work to date—the staggering mise en abyme of The Forbidden Room (2013)—would be The Green Fog, a 63-minute, found-footage video reimagining of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), is entirely apropos (and a rather Maddin-esque sleight-of-hand) when one considers the fanfare with which The Green [...]More →

By Lawrence Garcia On September 23, 1972, President Ferdinand Marcos plunged the Philippines into a period of martial law that would last nearly a decade. Characterized by economic stagnation and rampant human rights abuses, the years that followed—during which Marcos consolidated his brutal kleptocracy—saw massive infrastructure developments in the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) [...]More →